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Why Everyone Should Train In Traditional Karate

There are so many options these days.

It doesn’t matter if you’re looking for a university (that place where you pay extortionate fees for an education you probably could have gotten from YouTube for free), or toilet paper (likely the pinnacle of human achievement thus far) – you’ve got options galore.

The fitness industry has surely reached near-complete saturation by this point – even in yoga circles there are at least a dozen options, from Bikram to Ashtanga, Hatha to.. AcroYoga?

In the “martial arts” space there are also six zillion options, and one is traditional karate. I started learning karate when I was 11 and started teaching karate a few years ago. Therefore I am naturally about to tell you why what I do is the best, and everything else is poop.

I know what you’re thinking. “Chris that sounds awesome, when do we learn the 3 finger tiger style exploding face technique?”

Great question, I’m glad you asked. Let’s look at what traditional karate won’t do for you:

You won’t win any medals, there aren’t any medals.

You probably won’t have a heap of fun to start with, it takes a while to become masochistic enough to genuinely enjoy hours and hours (and hours) of hard physical training. Honestly though, it’s great.

No one is going to be throwing high fives and “broing it up” with you after class fraternity style, it won’t happen.

Your body wont cooperate, likely for years.

You won’t feel like you’ve mastered much, or anything at all, 10 or even 20 years later. I certainly haven’t.

Your body won’t like it – it won’t feel good and you might not feel like you’re going anywhere.

You won’t become a killing machine after 5 classes. You won’t become a killing machine after 500 classes, either.

Sounds pretty great, right?

Let’s look at some less impressive stuff, here is what traditional karate will do for you:

You’ll look at yourself a few years later an be blown away by how much you’ve slowly changed physically. Hard gains from hard training.

You’ll learn to respect yourself, and to respect all other human beings.

You’ll make better decisions in stressful situations, both physically or mentally. You’ve have likely dealt with worse on the training floor.

5 foot tall or 7 foot tall, you’ll be able to look after yourself.

You’ll make as many friends as you want to make.

You’ll realise that competition, improvement and success is an internal phenomenon.

You’ll have started a journey that takes a lifetime to complete. Training in your 60’s is common, 70’s is common. People train traditional karate into their 80’s.

Traditional karate hasn’t changed with the times, the last thing that really changed was the belt system so that we have these funny coloured belts now (rather than just white belts and black belts). That happened bloody ages ago.

Traditional karate teaches you that you can improve your life immeasurably through the tool that is hard work. Hard work and discipline don’t seem to be particularly popular in 2017 – but I can assure you it is as worth it now as it was in the “good old days”.